Section of Neurology

THE SECTION OF NEUROLOGY is comprised of approximately 75 neurologists who provide outstanding patient-centred care to people with neurologic conditions and symptoms, conduct paradigm-changing medical research, and train the neurologists of the future.  

We Care

In 2022-2023, the neurologists in our section provided care through over 36,000 outpatient visits (in AHS facilities alone) and over 1,700 hospital stays at our two admitting centres, South Health Campus and Foothills Medical Centre.  

We provide clinical services at all five Calgary hospitals and innumerable outpatient clinics inside and outside AHS facilities.  We are proud to host sixteen clinical sub-programs and to have neurologists who cover the full scope of existing neurology subspecialties.  

We build innovative programs: This was the first full year of service delivery for the Advanced Care Team (ACT), led by Dr. Veronica Bruno. This program delivers wrap-around, multi-disciplinary care for patients living with late-stage movement disorders and their families.  We have received multiple commendations and letters from families touched by the outstanding, compassionate care provided to their loved ones by this program.  

We collaborate across disciplines: Our epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, neuroimmunology, neuromuscular, headache, and cognitive programs are all multi-disciplinary groups that bring together the expertise of neurologists and other medical and allied health team members, including neuropsychiatry, rheumatology, and geriatrics experts.

We are growing:  During this reporting year, we had two outstanding new neurologists join the group, Drs. Laura Baxter and Guillermo Delgado-Garcia.  Dr. Baxter completed her neurology residency training and a multiple sclerosis fellowship in Calgary and then worked in British Columbia, however, we were successful in recruiting her back to Calgary and she joined our MS program at South Health Campus in April.  Dr. Delgado-Garcia is an epileptologist who completed his neurology training in Mexico and then his fellowship training at with the Calgary Comprehensive Epilepsy Program.  He has taken a role as the epilepsy point-person at South Health Campus and has started a much-needed First Seizure Clinic in association with our Urgent Neurology Program at Foothills Medical Centre.

In addition to welcoming these new members, we successfully recruited another eight neurologists to join the Section of Neurology: two neuromuscular sub-specialists, Drs. Collin Luk and Gordon Jewett; a cognitive neurology subspecialist, Dr. Aaron Switzer; our first Functional Movement Disorders Specialist, Dr. Gabriela Gilmour; a general neurologist, Dr. Monica McKeown, and two more MS specialists, Dr. Jodi Roberts and Dr. Sarah Morrow and last, but certainly not least, Dr. Nathalie Jetté, an epileptologist, and world-class health systems researcher, who will join as our new DCNS Department Head in May of 2023.  Drs. Luk, Jewett, Switzer, Gilmour, and Morrow will join our programs in 2023, with Dr. Morrow being appointed as the new head of our MS program.  Drs. Roberts and McKeown will join the Section in the fall of 2024. 

We Educate

Neurologists provide education to medical students, undergraduate students, graduate students, residents, subspecialty fellows, family physicians, nurses, patients, and community advocacy groups.  Over the last year, our residency program welcomed a new program director, Dr. Vikram Karnik, and Assistant Program Director, Dr. Megan Yaraskavitch, and a new Competence Committee Chair, Dr. Veronica Bruno.  With this, we have seen a complete re-vamping of our process for weighting residency applicants, taking on the ‘holistic’ approach to resident selection that has been taken up in other jurisdictions, and continuous quality improvement activities for our residency rotations.  

This approach is expected to encourage recruitment of well-rounded and diverse applicants to our residency program and to deepen the wealth of experience and perspectives that our trainees bring to the Department.  

All our residents passed the Royal College Examinations in the 2022-2023 reporting year and went on to prestigious national and international fellowship programs.  Last but not least, we continue to recruit trainees and observers from around the world to our Section to complete fellowships in our nine fellowship programs.  

We Innovate

As in the past, Section of Neurology researchers have been leaders in their field, advancing the science, innovating in care delivery, and pushing new concepts to application in medical practice and to commercial markets.  Members of our group continue to deliver in research and innovation across all our programs.  Work in two of our programs drew international media attention this year: the discovery of “TikTok Tics” by members of our Movement Disorders Program and the results of the ESCAPE trials, which transformed acute stroke care to include endovascular thrombectomy through the leadership of the Calgary Stroke Program, were featured in the New York Times.   

In this reporting period, Section of Neurology members published over 250 peer-reviewed  papers and successfully secured millions of dollars in competitive research funding.  It is impossible to adequately summarize the volume of research output in this group within the confines of this report.

In addition, through the ground-breaking work of Dr. Lawrence Korngut, a neuromuscular specialist and the Director of Innovation and Commercialization at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, several members of our Section were able to move their innovations to launch start-ups.